Following an accomplished career in science, mathematics and engineering, Allan Darst Conover taught engineering and building
construction at the University of Wisconsin in the 1880s. He became interested in architecture with the construction of Science
Hall in 1884, with which he helped architect Henry Koch of Milwaukee. The following year, Conover started practicing architecture
while he continued teaching, when he took on Lew Porter, a talented former student as a partner in an architecture firm. Together
the firm designed scores of city, county, state and federal buildings, schools, banks, commercial buildings, churches and
residences through 1899, when they dissolved their partnership. Their firm was a training ground for
Frank Lloyd Wright,
Louis Claude and
Alvin Small,
among others, who became architects of some importance. Conover & Porter’s office was based in Madison,
though they had offices in Ashland in 1887-1889, and for a short time in Baraboo during the early 1890s.